“Really, dude?” I hold up a DVD ofShowgirlsI find beside the TV, sandwiched betweenZoolanderandSuper Troopers.
“Big Kyle MacLachlan fan,” he says.
“Riiiight.”
I pick up a tiny, hand-painted wooden turtle bobblehead fromhis nightstand. I attempt a reenactment of the “Bohemian Rhapsody” scene inWayne’s Worldwith it, but it slips out of my hand. It winds up rolling under the bed, so I drop to the floor. The oatmeal-colored Berber carpet is rough against my bare skin as I wiggle myself half under the metal frame and rescue the turtle.
“Hey, did you know you have a baseball bat under here?” I ask. “And a flashlight? At least I hope that’s a flashlight.”
“I’m not sure what else you think it could be,” Hollis says in a faux-innocent tone that makes it clear that he does indeed know what I’m talking about. “Now, as captivating as it is to watch you dig around under there with your bare ass in the air—”
“Hold on... what’s this?” I slide a slender, forest-green book out from under the bed and read the cover. “Walt Whitman. Did you know this was under there?”
“Wait,” Hollis says, almost falling off the bed as he reaches for the book. I dodge his hand and open to the title page. Someone inscribed this copy:To Hollis—I love your every multitude. Forever yours, Vanessa.
Hollis tears the book from my hands, his face drained of all color.
“So, Vanessa,” I say, trying to sound casual. “Who’s she?”
“No one worth discussing,” he says, and flings Walt Whitman into the empty trash can by the door.
“Wait a second. The other day, when I was joking about you not doing relationships anymore because someone broke your heart—Hollis, is that actually what happened?”
I’m about to laugh when he turns away from me, the muscles in his back hard and tense. Oh. This isn’t another remnant of his youth that stayed behind in this room when he moved on to adulthood. It’s something he still hauls around with him.
I wrap my arms around his waist and press myself against him. This is my chance to figure out if whatever turned him off love is something he’ll ever be willing to cast aside. “What went so wrong with Vanessa that you never want to try again?”
Hollis doesn’t respond.
“Will you tell me if I guess correctly?” I ask into his shoulder blade.
He lets out a humorless huff. “Pretty sure you won’t.”
“Did she cheat?” It’s too obvious, but I’d be remiss not to start there. I wait a beat but am met with silence. “Okay, so not that. Did she not actually love your every multitude and disapprove of your aspirations to become a writer?”
Nothing.
“Okay. So what then? She turned out to be a flat-Earther? Ate your goldfish in front of you? Tried to frame you for tax evasion? Don’t tell me all this ‘lasting love doesn’t exist’ nonsense is because you ultimately wanted different things.”
Hollis flashes one of his horrible, gritted-teeth fake smiles. “If by ‘wanted different things,’ you mean I wanted to marry her and she wanted revenge on my father, then yeah, I guess we wanted different things.”
“What.”
His shoulders sag as he exhales, like he can no longer hide the way this weighs on him. “Can we at least have this conversation sitting down?” Hollis takes my hand and leads me to the bed. He sits on the edge and pulls me onto his lap. The skin-on-skin contact lasts about ten seconds before he says, “God, your ass bones are sharp,” and knocks me off. I yelp as I fall backward onto the comforter. Hollis sprawls beside me and drapes an arm over my hips, tugging me closer. His eyes dart around as he observes myface. My determination to get some clarification must be apparent, because he asks wearily, “Is there any way I get to go to sleep tonight without talking about this?”
“No. Because I don’t thinkIcan sleep without talking about this. You can’t just say something like that and then not elaborate.”
“Fine,” he says. “Short version: I was a senior in college, I met a second-year lit PhD student at a lecture, I fell completely and stupidly in love with her way too fast, thought she felt the same way, took her home to meet my dad and sister. Turned out she was my dad’s ex and was only with me to get back at him for dumping her.”
My eyes go wide and it takes me a while to remember to blink. “I have... so many questions. I mean, how did you not—”
I’m not sure if the frown on Hollis’s face is deeper than any other he’s ever given me, or if laying so close and side-by-side is somehow exaggerating the curve. Still, I get the message: This is the sorest of subjects. Figuring question time is limited, I readjust my strategy to make the most of it. “So clearly things between you and her ended. What happened with you and your dad?”
“We had a huge fight. About how his selfishness had hurt so many people—which I still stand by, actually. I said some unnecessarily terrible things to him, though. Like how I’d always be disappointed to have a father who wasn’t a better man.”
I’m so tempted to try to dig deeper into what he means by his father’s “selfishness,” because the way he emphasizes the word reminds me of how adamantly he insists he’s ruled by nothing but his own selfish impulses. Like maybe Hollis has convinced himself that his father’s choices are a symptom of something genetic, something inescapable that’s also embedded in his own DNA. But all I manage to say is, “Ouch.”
“I was only twenty-one,” he explains. “Young. Impetuous. I did know on some level that I couldn’t blame him for what Vanessa did, and I actually agreed with his reasons for breaking up with her once he explained. For all his flaws, my father’s always been weirdly ethical in his philandering—that was the first and last time he dated a student in his own department. But I was so angry and heartbroken. And my mother had just died. I needed to be mad at someone. Blame someone. He understood, I think. Understands. But it definitely made our already somewhat-strained relationship a lot worse for a while.”
